Do as the Court tells you

A Claimant (consumer) issued proceedings against our client, although we were advising and assisting our client before proceedings were issued, the Claimant was not happy with the answer they had received, so they issued further proceedings which we again assisted with defending the claim.

Proceedings take months and certain orders given by the Court need to be followed by both parties. One of the orders is a Witness Statement from each party, to be filed with any evidence the party intends to rely on at the future hearing. A copy must be filed with the other party as well as the Court. In this particular case, the Claimant did not follow the order and as such no Witness Statement nor documentation of evidence was ever served to the Court or our client.

Due to the onus being on the consumer to prove his claim against our client and having not filed any such documentation, it was requested the claim be struck out.

The Judge agreed and the claim was dismissed as well as costs being awarded to our client!

Comments

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(cAse SeNSItivE!)

Peggy (12/10/2016)

This was a very hard lesson my wife and I learned, we had a limited company, which was greatly over charged by a firm of accountants, the amounts were disputed, and new accountant, who was doing the same work for a quarter of the previous firm.
Needless to say the dispute never came to a resolve, and the accountants issued proceedings which we took to a local firm of solicitors, as time went on we would receive requests from the Court giving a set time to supply our full defence, every time we saw our solicitor his response was it would be okay, as time passed a court hearing date was received, as the court was out of his and our area the solicitor appointed a local barrister to act on our behalf.
Needless to say the judge gave the barrister such a telling off because our solicitor had failed to meet the courts deadlines on two occasions, and denied our request to submit a full defence and to change the court to our local court. The judge gave us a one week adjournment the fulfil the previous request before he would consider our request to supply a full defence and change the court.
One week later having complied with the court, the same judge turned down our application to submit a full defence, which ed showed from the accountants own invoices that in fact we owed them nothing. My wife and I decided that we would act for ourselves at the main court date as our solicitor had made a complete hash of the whole thing and we couldn't use our full defence which had been disallowed.
We arrived at court, this occasion a different judge who had the full defence along with all other paperwork, the new judge was a really simpathetic judge, and on numerous occasions tried to introduce our full defence, unfortunately the accoutants legal representation kept reminding the judge that this was disallowed, leaving us without any defence.
The judge had no alternative other than to find in the accountants favour, he did in all fairness disallow about £7000 in added interest and costs.
The outcome caused us to place our company into volutary liquidation, as this was the cheapest option.
The moral to this is to do your due diligence and make sure that you appoint a solicitor that has knowledge of the current court rules, and complies with the court by the dates requested.
I would love to name both the firm of solicitors, and the firm of overcharging accountants but this wouldn't be ethical.

This is why we pay you (06/10/2016)

This is exactly the reason we pay you good money, because you're excellent :)